The process of researching, designing, and fabricating a model recreating a 1961 floating sculpture by French artist Marta Pan in a collaboration between the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Cambridge, and the Skissernas Museum, Lund.

April 2008

April 13, 2008

From Katharine (April 5): For our next salon we met with Professor James D. Livingston, whose expertise is magnets. This was incredibly interesting because we are considering creating our floating sculpture with magnets.

We talked for a little and provided different ideas that could be applied to our sculpture. One of the possibilities that came up was using the same concept as the floating globe that Professor Livingston has on his desk. He went over the concept of how magnets has a point that acts as both a minimum and a maximum or a saddle point. This is why we cannot use different magnets to try and control the floatation of the sculpture. What we can do, however, is to use a capacitor to track the floatation of the sculpture and maintain the correct distance so that the sculpture is always at an equilibrium and doesn't sway or tip over. All of this has to be carefully monitored and taken care of.

After discussing the possibilities, we left early to finish the Eloranta Scholarship.

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From Katharine (April 3): For our second salon, we met with Professor C. Adam Schlosser, who works with water in the ground. He explained to us some of the projects he was working on using computer simulations and explained one very important concept: Nature has an uncanny ability to achieve equilibrium. If we intend to push nature in a certain direction, it isn't long before nature begins to push back and sometimes with devastating consequences.

The following example was given: If the temperatures rise on average of two degrees, most people would hardly notice. There might be a slight increase in everyone's electricity bill, but no one would really notice, right? Not quite. Apparently, with the rise of these two degrees would trap over half of the world's freshwater, making it inaccessible.

Another interesting idea presented by Professor Schlosser: there are so many possibilities, so many scenarios of how the earth's future could play out, that all there really is... is chaos. He explained that any small alteration could eventually cause changes in other places, which in turn would change something else.

After the talk, we decided to pursue these two important points. We wanted to know exactly, what was equilibrium. The earth's climate has been known to cycle and scientists have always tried to predict the future using past cycles. So where exactly is the equilibrium in the cycle? What qualifications would we have to use to decide? All of these things were ideas that we wanted to pursue a little more later after the meeting.

On the topic of chaos, all of us were interested in looking at ways to filter out all by the most important and probable possibilities to try and accurately predict the different futures to create the final sculpture.